Roel UyttenbroeckUniversity of Liège | ulg · Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech
Roel Uyttenbroeck
PhD in Bioscience Engineering
About
18
Publications
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558
Citations
Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (18)
Wildflower strips (WS) are proposed in many European countries as a strategy to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services in arable fields. To create and maintain WS on nutrient-rich cultivated soils reveals challenging. Flowered species may be outcompeted by grasses due to high phosphorus content in soil. We studied during 5 years seed mixture (...
Reducing the use of insecticides is an important issue for agriculture today. Sowing wildflower strips along field margins or within crops represents a promising tool to support natural enemy populations in agricultural landscapes and, thus, enhance conservation biological control. However, it is important to sow appropriate flower species that att...
Habitats being restored in Belgian quarries are easily invaded by non-native plant species, which can hamper the germination and development of vegetation deemed to be of high conservation value. Substrates of terraces created when mining limestone quarries could be inhospitable to native plants. However, they can provide opportunities for establis...
The decline of pollinators in agricultural areas has been observed for some decades, this being partly due to landscape simplification in intensive agrosystems. Diversifying agricultural landscapes by sowing flower strips within fields could reduce these adverse effects on biodiversity. In this context, the study presented here aimed at assessing a...
Insect pests are responsible, among other factors, for reducing the productivity of crops. While chemical insecticides used to control them cause harmful effects on human health and the environment, conservation biological control, i.e. managing habitats in agricultural landscapes to support pest natural enemies, turns out to be a promising approac...
Intensification of agriculture has been one of the major drivers for biodiversity loss in recent decades. Pollinators, which serve an important role in pollinating crops as well as wild plants, have shown a decline in species richness. Flower strips can be used to support pollinators in agro-ecosystems, however the question remains as to how their...
In order to explore some potential insect sources of food lipids, the lipid compositions of three Orthopterans (Acheta domesticus, Conocephalus discolor and Chorthippus parallelus) were analyzed and compared with those of Tenebrio molitor larvae. A. domesticus, Co. discolor, Ch. parallelus and T. molitor larvae were found to contain approximately 1...
Among the semi-natural elements in agricultural landscapes, wildflower strips sown at field margins or within fields are potential habitats for the natural enemies of insect pests. As insects are sensitive to a variety of flower traits, we hypothesized that mixtures with high functional diversity attract and support a higher abundance and species r...
Insects, particularly those belonging to the family Acrididae (grasshoppers), are commonly consumed as human food in many parts of the world. Grasshoppers of the species Chorthippus parallelus are abundantly found throughout Europe. However, these insects were not consumed by Europeans till now, but could possibly be used as human food, which is wh...
Description of the subject. Current trends suggest an increasing future demand for conventional meats, which indicates a strong need to shift this dependency to other alternative protein sources such as insects.
Literature. From a nutritional point of view, of all the insects consumed globally, grasshoppers are particularly important as a human fo...
![Figure 1. Radar plot of the log-transformed (log [n+1]) number of...](profile/Roel-Uyttenbroeck/publication/301533227/figure/fig1/AS:353322142846978@1461249971930/Radar-plot-of-the-log-transformed-log-n-1-number-of-papers-selected-for-each_Q320.jpg)
Description of the subject. To counteract environmental problems due to agricultural intensification, European farmers can apply agri-environmental schemes in their fields. Flower strips are one example of these schemes, with the aim of supporting biodiversity, leading to an increase in “useful” species groups such as pollinators for crop pollinati...
Reducing pesticide use is one the major issues of today's agriculture. Among other possibilities, attracting and conserving pest natural enemies in agricultural landscapes by providing them habitats is promising. Wildflower strips (WFS) sown at field margins are one of these potential habitats. They are known to attract and conserve a large diversi...
In last decades, farmland biodiversity came under large threat. To counteract farmland biodiversity loss and other environmental impacts of intensive agriculture, European farmers can apply Agri-environmental schemes. One of these is the creation of flower strips, a part of the cropping field where flowers are sown or naturally settled. Flower stri...
Eating insects as food, particularly grasshopper is practiced in many cultures throughout the world. Meadow grasshopper (Chorthippus parallelus) is commonly found in Europe and some part of Asia. It is already known that grasshoppers of Chorthippus species are consumed as food in countries such as Thailand. With the aim of evaluating the nutritiona...
Parmi les Mesures Agri-Environnementales wallonnes soutenues par l’Union Européenne figure
l’aménagement des bordures de parcelles. Il existe divers types d’aménagements dont celui d’y semer des
mélanges fleuris. Ceux-ci sont connus pour abriter une large diversité d’insectes et parmi eux, des ennemis
naturels des ravageurs qui peuvent être mobilis...
Field border flowering strips are commonly grown throughout the world mainly to enhance biodiversity. However besides their basic function they can also yield numerous compounds which could be interesting for wide range of industries such as food, pharmaceutical, etc. With the aim of valorization, proximate compositional analysis of seeds from some...
Most studies focusing on the effects of urban land use on pollinators have compared urban sites with one type of rural site. However, there is a lot of variation in the amount of natural habitats or intensive agriculture in rural areas. The position of urban areas within that continuum in terms of pollinator communities remains unclear. In this wor...
Questions
Questions (2)
I sampled plant-pollinator networks along a gradient. Using the R package 'bipartite' I calculated a set of network metrics. The 'niche overlap' of the pollinator level as well as the 'functional diversity' (measure of niche complementarity) of both plant and pollinator level show a decrease with the gradient. At first glance, this seems contradicting to me. Is this possible, and what could be the explanation?
The recent paper of King et al. (2013) in Methods in Ecology and Evolution criticizes the use of flower visitation in studying pollination networks. Flower visitors are not always equal to flower pollinators. In the mutualistic network of flowers and pollinators, flowers benefit from pollinators for their reproduction, while pollinators benefit from the flowers by obtaining nectar and pollen. If we have to take into account the pollinator effectiveness (how much the pollinator contributes to pollination in one flower visit), why don't we take into account the 'flower effectiveness' (how much rewards the flower gives to the pollinator)? Can a flower visitor that is not a pollinator have an other function in the interaction network? Is it the interaction that matters in a pollination network or is it the pollen and rewards flux ?
Projects
Project (1)
The goal of the project is to isolate, characterize and modify novel compounds of agricultural origin, and more precisely from original resources, such as field border flowering strips and insects. The present multi-disciplinary project aims to highlight some possible ways of valorization of the plants used in the wildflower strips as well as the insects present in those strips. The research hypothesis sustaining this project is that several flowering plant species can be considered as potential interesting sources of nutrients (oils or fats) and/or bio-active molecules for food or non-food uses. Moreover, the flowering herbaceous strips alongside crop fields also harbor a very large amount of insects, including edible insects such as grasshopper and cricket. Considering both plant and insect diversity of the surrounding managed areas, a screening of several food and non-food molecules will be performed to select most interesting nutrients but also pharmaceutical or healthy materials in order to optimize plant and insect diversity regarding their further ways of valorization.
